iceroyalty of Nanking, with _carte blanche_
to carry out his progressive ideas; and the metropolitan viceroy,
Yuan, on taking leave of the Empress Dowager before proceeding to
the manoeuvres, besought her not to listen to reactionary counsels
such as those which had produced the disasters of 1900.

In view of these facts, what wonder that Chinese newspapers are
discussing the question of a national religion? The fires of the
old altars are well-nigh extinct; and, among those who have come
forward to
[Page vii]
advocate the adoption of Christianity as the only faith that meets
the wants of an enlightened people, one of the most prominent is
a priest of Buddha.

May we not look forward with confidence to a time when China shall
be found in the brotherhood of Christian nations?

W. A. P. M.

_Peking, October 30, 1906._

[Page ix]
INTRODUCTION

How varied are the geological formations of different countries,
and what countless ages do they represent! Scarcely less diversified
are the human beings that occupy the surface of the globe, and not
much shorter the period of their evolution. To trace the stages
of their growth and decay, to explain the vicissitudes through
which they have passed, is the office of a philosophic historian.

If the life history of a silkworm, whose threefold existence is
rounded off in a few months, is replete with interest, how much
more interesting is that of societies of men emerging from barbarism
and expanding through thousands of years. Next in interest to the
history of our own branch of the human family is that of the yellow
race confronting us on the opposite shore of the Pacific; even
more fascinating, it may be, owing to the strangeness of manners
and environment, as well as from the contrast or coincidence of
experience and sentiment. So different from ours (the author writes
as an American) are many phases of their social life that one is
tempted to suspect that the same law, which placed their feet opposite
to ours, of necessity turned their heads the other way.

To pursue this study is not to delve in a necropolis like Nineveh
or Babylon; for China is not, like western Asia, the grave of dead
empires, but the home of a people
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endowed with inexhaustible vitality. Her present greatness and her
future prospects alike challenge admiration.

If the inhabitants of other worlds could look down on us, as we
look up at the moon, there are only five empires on the